简论语言功能

语言的形式与功能之间并非总密切相关。交际实质上是一系列的交际行为或言语行为 ,而任何言语行为由最少两种或典型的三种分行为组成 :非语内表现行为、语内表现行为和言语表达效果行为。分析言语行为以及语言的各种功能有助于第二语言学习者掌握如何利用语言知识来实现语言的各种功能     

Identity Conflicts and Value Pluralism—What Can We Learn from Religious Psychoanalytic Therapists?

Does the way we think about our personal self‐complexity affect how we accept others? Researchers have offered various conceptualizations of how individuals manage their complex identities, while others have identified links between cognitive complexity and acceptance of outgroups. This paper integrates the two bodies of work by positing a route by which personal identity conflicts may lead to cognitive and cultural pluralism. For individuals committed to multiple identities perceived as conflicting, the intra‐psychic experience of value conflicts may lead to a recognition of self‐complexity, which is then transposed from the personal domain to the social one and expressed as a pluralistic attitude towards others. This argument find support in a study of Israeli Jewish Orthodox psychoanalytic therapists who belong to what they perceive as non‐pluralistic religious groups, yet express value pluralism, which they attribute to their complex identities. One of the educational implications of this study is that facilitating engagement with internal complexity, multiple identities and personal value conflicts may promote pluralistic thinking for individuals in religious societies.     

Understanding the Harm of Hate Crime

This article provides an overview of the context and content of this issue devoted to hate crime. Working definitions of hate crime and hate speech are situated within the broader context of intergroup relations, prejudice, aggression, and law and social policy. Theory and research from social psychology, criminology, and legal studies are utilized to describe this context. We present summaries of the multidisciplinary contributions to this issue and note how these articles emphasize the origins of hate crime, the harm that it creates, and victims' and society's response to hate crime. They also highlight tensions between the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Finally, we note the interrelationships among these contributions and discuss the policy implications that arise from their analyses.     

重塑社会学的想象力——语言/视觉二元论以及文化社会学的符像转向

以意义为中心的文化社会学遭遇的关键挑战之一就是不得不面对当代人类学、考古学、艺术史和物质文化研究等领域的发现。其越来越紧迫的任务就是认识并修正曾经由这些学科所确立的语言学/文本框架之解释的局限性。传统结构主义者集中关注各种话语符码,而且,在理解复杂的表象经济的权力,特别是在履行解释其变异性方面,文化符号之任意性的假设显得捉襟见肘。语言和以沟通为中心的框架通常忽视的事实是,被相信具有因果性社会力量的绝大多数能指无可避免地嵌入在开放的但并非无限制的感情与物质性结构之中。因此,行动中需要整合能力更强且维度更多的文化模式。本文主要讨论符像性对发展一个与此相关的整合性视角的重要性,同时并不抛弃语言学转向的一些构成性洞见。我以亚历山大等当代学者的转型性工作和我自己的研究来证实,被如此构想的文化的复合体才是具因果律的社会力。我的目的在于详尽阐述物质性文化研究中的一个关键原则,即不同的符号秩序对于决定性和/或自主性逻辑而言是不同的主题,并且由此对“社会建构”和历史转型的不同模式做出回应。我们需要继续关注奥斯汀关于如何以言行事的问题,但是不能重复他的局限,即似乎社会之事发生之际同时并不伴随图像、对象、场所、身体和所有它们的特征以及使用暗含。对社会学想象力的这一扩展予以充实,可以帮助我们激活理解和解释文化这一概念所拥有的充分潜力,并由此坚定地转向文化。     

Acts of Social Perspective Taking: A Functional Construct and the Validation of a Performance Measure for Early Adolescents

To understand and assess how early adolescents use their social perspective taking (SPT) skills in their consideration of social problems, we conducted two studies. In study 1, we administered a hypothetical SPT scenario to 359 fourth to eighth graders. Modeled on the linguistic pragmatics of speech acts, we used grounded theory to develop a functional approach that identified three types of SPT acts: (1) the acknowledgment of different actors, (2) the articulation of their thoughts and feelings, and (3) the positioning of the roles, experiences, or circumstances that influence how they resolve problems. Study 2 tested the validity of an expanded instrument, the Social Perspective Taking Acts Measure, with 459 fourth to eighth graders. We confirmed the structure of the construct with a fully saturated confirmatory factor analysis, with factor loadings in the range of .62 and .71, and a factor determinacy of .90. We obtained evidence of criterion‐related validity by successfully predicting that girls and older participants would exhibit better performance than boys and younger students, and that SPT would exhibit a negative association with aggressive interpersonal strategies, a positive but moderate association with writing, and non‐significant associations with academic language, complex reasoning, and reading skills.     

Inner Speech as a Language: A Saussurean Inquiry

The idea that thinking is a form of talking to oneself was discussed in classical Greece, analyzed by the Medievals and treated as a central issue by the American pragmatists. But whether inner speech is a language unto itself, distinct from outer language, has not been determined. To this end I ask how Saussure's defining ideas about language apply to inner speech. I show that Saussure's ideas, while partly usable, are mainly a poor fit. Inner speech is a variety of language, or perhaps of dialect, with its own unique structure. Given that it is a unique window into human consciousness, I briefly discuss some of the research areas on which it sheds light.     

Mutual Contributions of Individuals, Partners, and Institutions: Planning to Remember in Girl Scout Cookie Sales

This paper argues that planning entails distributed, mutual contributions of individuals, their social partners, and their community institutions. We suggest that these mutually involved contributions can be viewed through shifts in focus of analysis, contrasting with analyses of cognitive development that treat individuals as though they exist apart from their social and cultural worlds. We illustrate this argument with a study examining the distributed nature of planning to remember in a complex everyday task. We investigated the personal, interpersonal, and institutional cognitive contributions of 16 Girl Scouts, their mothers and customers and other companions, and institutions (the national organization and the cookie company) in keeping track of deliveries and planning collection of money in Girl Scout cookie sales and deliveries. The article also discusses an analytic methodology (Functional Pattern Analysis) for abstracting findings from the details of rich ethnographic data. Individual scouts, their mothers, customers, and the scouting organization and cookie company all played significant roles in keeping track of progress. In particular, tools and supports provided by the cookie company played a key role in organizing the cognitive tasks, and the scouts collaborated in planning with other people (usually their mothers and customers). Our findings illustrate the importance of examining contributions beyond those of the individual, while still recognizing the active roles of individuals in thinking. We argue that conceiving of individual, interpersonal, and institutional/cultural contributions as mutually constituting aspects of cognitive activities supports this aim beyond the usual focus on separate individual and ‘external’ factors.     

Communicative competence in 5- to 8-year-olds with mild or moderate learning difficulties and their classroom peers: referential and negotiation skills

Two studies were run to examine communicative and social aspects of the interaction between 5- to 8-year-old children with mild or moderate learning difficulties (LD) and their classroom peers for whom no such difficulties had been observed (NLD). In the first study, the children's communicative responses to a referential group task were explored, through children describing drawings to each other. In terms of the nature of information exchange, few differences were found between NLD and LD children. Differences were found in terms of the social content of language: in the listener role, LD children tended to be the recipients of more critical and directive speech. The second study, focusing on consensus forming and negotiation processes in a co-operative group task, mirrored the patterns of social aspects found in Study 1. LD children tended to be less influential in affecting the consensus and in directing the course of the task.     

Interrelation between empathy and friendship development during (pre)adolescence and the moderating effect of developmental language disorder: A longitudinal study

The association between empathy and friendship quality in children and adolescents is well established, but longitudinal studies are lacking. Because social interactions typically involve language, these relations might be moderated by children's communication problems. The current study examined the interrelation of friendship quality (positive and negative) and empathy (affective, cognitive, and prosocial motivation) development of 317 children (8–16 years old) at three time points across 18 months. Of these children 112 had a developmental language disorder (DLD). Results confirmed a bidirectional relation between empathy and friendship quality across time. Cognitive empathy and prosocial motivation contributed to the development of more positive friendship features in children with and without DLD. For children with unstable friendships, more cognitive empathy was related to fewer negative friendship features. Positive friendship features in turn contributed to higher empathy on all three aspects. Negative friendship features were related to higher affective empathy and lower prosocial motivation in both groups, but did not predict empathy development across time. These results imply that positive friendship features are important for development of empathic skills and vice versa that empathy enables children to grow in friendship quality in children with and without DLD.     

Market stewardship of quasi‐markets by street level bureaucrats: The role of local area coordinators in the Australian personalisation system

With the rise in popularity of market‐based responses to social policy challenges, the stewardship of quasi‐markets or public service markets, is a key concern for governments worldwide. Debates about how to manage quasi‐markets have focussed on high‐level decision‐making processes. However local actors, in particular street level bureaucrats, are a key part of the complex work of managing quasi‐markets. We examine how street level bureaucrats act as local market stewards in a new quasi‐market for disability care, the Australian National Disability Insurance scheme. We find that the street level bureaucrats, known as local area coordinators, act as shapers of local markets but that their contributions are informal and often restricted by formal structures and processes. For example, we found evidence that the use of key performance indicators can disrupt effective local stewardship efforts towards a procedural approach. We conclude that introducing principles of the polycentric governance approach can improve connections between local market knowledge holders and central decision‐making agencies, thereby improving market stewardship and outcomes.     

The Psychologic of Implication

This paper is a preliminary inquiry into the nature of implication; how things are seen as 'going together' or following one from another. The argument presented here is that implication is non-logical and is central to the routine process of reason, induction and generalization. The organizing force underlying implication and practical inference is argued to be Von Domarus' Principle (VDP), by which similarity on some dimension of interest 'carries over' to some other dimension of interest.
One major difficulty with this formulation is that where VDP is the only organizing force, incoherent utterances resembling the word salad of the schizophrenic are likely to result, quite a departure from the routine utterances of normals that a useful model should generate. Two important ways that normal speech and word salad differ are that, in the latter, associations are, first, often implausible or bizarre, and second, they are likely to be so personalistic as to be virtually inaccessible to others.
These considerations led to a search for elements that would provide the corrections necessary to bring the products of a VDP based model of implication close to normal utterances in these two areas. One element that appears central, concerns the role of subjective probability in evaluating plausibility of associations. Also considered are aspects of ambiguities in ordinary language especially concerning number and probability. The problem of making associations accessible to others is mitigated by providing elements in the setting or the communication itself that act to highlight or salience the association intended to be communicated. Finally, suggestions for further research are presented.     

Intention Understanding and Partner-Sensitive Behaviors in Young Children's Peer Interactions

Recent research on peer interaction shows that complex, coordinated play emerges around 24 months. Increased understanding of others' intentions has been proposed as a reason for its emergence at this juncture. In this study, we assessed understanding of the intentional structure of human action in children aged 19 to 39 months by eliciting verbal explanations of observed action. We hypothesized that more elaborated understanding of intention would be related to more partner-sensitive behaviors during interactions with familiar, same-age peers at home. We found that level of intention understanding predicted types of overtures made, types of objects offered, monitoring partner responses, partner compliance, and types of speech acts addressed to partners. Results are discussed in terms of the contribution of intention understanding to interactive competence, the role of linguistic competence in conceptual development, the effects of context on the production of speech acts and developing theory of mind.     

The effects on intra‐generational inequality of introducing a funded pension scheme: A microsimulation analysis for Estonia

This article uses a single male cohort microsimulation model to analyse the intra‐generational and distributional effects of a shift in Estonia from a defined benefit pay‐as‐you‐go (PAYG) pension system to a multi‐pillared system with a PAYG scheme with contribution‐based insurance components and a funded pension scheme. We contribute to the literature on microsimulation by showing how introducing contribution‐based insurance components and compulsory defined contribution (DC) schemes can increase pension inequality. Our results show that in the case of a high level of inequality in labour earnings and high long‐term unemployment rates, such as in Estonia, the introduction of a very strong link between contributions and future benefits leads to considerably higher inequality in pension incomes as measured by the Gini coefficient. Simulation results for Estonia suggest that inequality in old‐age pension incomes more than doubles when the reforms mature. In contrast, the inequality in replacement rates decreases.     

MICROBEHAVIORS IN GROUP DECISION-MAKING

An exploratory field experiment sought to study the effects of three levels of task complexity on the decision-making patterns of seven long term, on-going task groups. Decision-making was identified as consisting of five behaviors; namely, organization, information exchange, alternative generation, evaluation, and non-task behaviors. The results confirmed the predictions for alternative generation and non-task behaviors: alternative generation occurred most frequently with moderate task complexity; non-task behaviors occurred the least frequently at the level of moderate complexity. The organization behavior increased with increasing task complexity, while information exchange and evaluation showed no differences in frequency of occurrence across the three levels of complexity.     

A Social Psychology of National and International Group Relations

This concluding article provides a framework for a social psychological analysis of intergroup conflict and conflict resolution. The framework highlights the individual and intergroup factors that shape the nature of perceptions of intergroup relations and group representations, and describes how these perceptions lead to cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses toward groups. Included in the framework are the metatheoretical, theoretical, and practical contributions of the articles in this issue toward understanding intergroup relations. The potential and responsibility of social psychologists to move beyond the laboratory to applied national and international issues is also discussed.     

Child‐centric or family focused? A study of child welfare workers' perceptions of ethnic minority children in England and Norway

This paper analyses child welfare workers' perceptions of ethnic minority children in England and Norway based on in‐depth interviews with 52 child welfare workers in 2008. We employ a child‐centric theoretical framework to explore up to what extent workers focus on minority children in their perceptions. We found that about half of our study participants (n= 27) did so, and many more in Norway than England. They perceived many risks and problems for minority children related to their ethnicity, including children's biculturalism and language skills, parenting methods, unequal treatment and racism, lack of social inclusion, and problems in school. Norwegian workers displayed a broad needs perception and embraced a change‐orientated perspective and held parents accountable for their children's educational success and social inclusion. English workers had a narrower approach, focusing on protecting children. We discuss how the cross‐country differences may be related to different welfare state and child welfare paradigms.     

Friendship and Delinquency: Selection and Influence Processes in Early Adolescence

Positive association of relevant characteristics is a widespread pattern among adolescent friends. A positive association may be caused by the selection of similar others as friends and by the deselection of dissimilar ones, but also by influence processes where friends adjust their behavior to each other. Social control theory argues that adolescents select each other as friends based on delinquency. Differential association theory, on the other hand, argues that adolescent friends influence each other's delinquency levels. We employ new statistical methods for assessing the empirical evidence for either process while controlling for the other process. These methods are based on ‘actor‐oriented’ stochastic simulation models. We analyze longitudinal data on friendship networks and delinquent behavior collected in four waves of 544 students in 21 first‐grade classrooms of Dutch secondary schools. Results indicate that adolescents select others as friends who have a similar level of delinquency compared with their own level. Estimates of the social influence parameters are not significant. The results are consistent with social control theory but provide no support for differential association theory.